Joseph Roth - Tarabas

“Where is he hiding?” someone asked.

And others shouted: “Yes, where is he hiding?”

The peasants who had seen the Virgin’s image thought no more of returning home that night. But others, too, who had only heard about the miracle, now began to unharness their little horses and lead them into Kristianpoller’s yard. They seemed to think it necessary to remain in a place where so divine an event had taken place. Slowly at first, with their cautiously groping, quietly grinding minds they received the wonderful tidings; they turned it about and about in their stolid, churning brains, doubted its truth, grew suddenly ecstatic, crossed themselves, gave praise to God, and overflowed with hatred against the Jews.

Where could he be, the Jew Kristianpoller? A few went into the bar to look for him. Behind the counter they found only the servant, Fedya, quite drunk and long since fast asleep. They looked for him in the guest-rooms where the officers were quartered. Bedding was tumbled, chests and cupboards opened.

Outside the inn and inside, in the yard, the people gathered. Yes, even the peasants who had already started on the road home turned back, eager to experience the miracle while there was still time. As they drew up at the hotel in their little carts together with their wives and children, they felt that they had not come back into the town to worship before the beneficent apparition, but to be revenged upon the Jew who had defiled the Mother of God. For the zeal of hatred ever exceeds the zeal of faith, and is sprier and more active than the devil. It seemed to the peasants that they had not only seen the miraculous image, all of them, with their own eyes, but also that they remembered in every smallest detail each sacrilegious action by which the Jew had soiled the picture and covered it with blue lime. And with their desire for revenge there mingled now an obscure feeling of guilt which they had laid upon their souls through being so heedless as to have let the Jew go his vile way in peace so long. That much was clear — it was the devil who had misled them into doing so.

They climbed down from their carts, armed with whips and clubs, with the sickles, scythes, and knives they had just bought. It was the hour when the Jews, dressed in their best clothes, began to leave the synagogue, old men and cripples nearly all of them. Down upon these the peasants now descended. The armed, robust, infuriated men saw in the Jewish weaklings, in these infirm and aged men, trailing home in all their Sabbath helplessness, something particularly dangerous, more dangerous than health and wholeness, youth and arms. Yes, in the Jews’ unrhythmic trot, in the stoop of their backs and the dark solemnity of their long and gaping caftans, in their bowed heads, and even in the elusive shadows cast by their stumbling figures now here, now there, upon the road between the wooden sidewalks whenever they passed by one of the meagre oil-lanterns, in all these things the peasants thought they saw the truly hellish origin of this people that lived by trade and incendiarism, robbery and rapine.

As for the hobbling swarm of the poor Jews, they saw, or rather felt, catastrophe approaching. Only they stumbled on to meet it, half from sheer trust in the God they had just come from praising in the synagogue, and whom they felt at home and safe with (far too safe and far too much at home), and half paralysed by that cold fear with which nature in her cruelty has oppressed the weak, in order that they fall more surely prey to the power of the strong.

In the forefront of the peasants, whip in hand, strode one Pasternak, dignified to look upon with his tremendous bush of grey moustache. He belonged to the neighbourhood and was rich, and therefore doubly respected. When he came upon a level with the Jewish swarm, he raised his whip, swept the black and many-knotted thongs in a circle that cracked and whistled three or four times round his head, and then, his hand having caught the swing of it, he brought it down into the midst of the sombre bevy of the Jews. It struck a face or two. Here and there a cry went up. The entire baffled swarm stopped still. Some tried to keep well up against the walls of the houses and vanish in their shadow. Others, however, flung themselves down from the yard-high wooden sidewalk into the road before the peasants’ very feet. They picked them up and threw them into the air. Dozens of hands stretched out to catch the spinning Jews and toss them up again, and yet again, and for a fourth time.

The night was very clear. Against the star-strewn azure of the sky, the dense black, flapping figures of the Jews, fluttering up and falling down again, were like strange night-birds of enormous size. Like night-birds’, too, were the short, shrill cries they uttered. Their tormentors answered them with bellowing laughter. Here and there a waiting woman opened a shutter at a Jewish window, to close it instantly again.

“All Jews to Kristianpoller’s yard to kneel down and pray!’ cried out a voice. It was Ramzin’s. And Pasternak drove them with his whip down from the sidewalk. The peasants marched them in their midst to Kristianpoller’s.

In the out-house where the miracle had occurred two candles had now been lighted. They were stuck upon a log of wood and lit the Virgin’s face with their uncertain flame. All the soldiers, the followers of Colonel Tarabas as well, knelt down before the candles, sang, prayed, crossed themselves, bowed their heads, and struck their foreheads against the ground. The candles, continually renewed — no one could tell where they all had come from; it was as though every peasant had brought candles with him to Koropta — shed shadow rather than light. A solemn darkness reigned within the room, a darkness of which the two candles were the shining core. It smelt of cheap tallow, of sweat and leather, of acrid sheepskin and the hot breath of open mouths. Above their heads in a deep dusk, in the impotent, wavering light of the weak flames, the gentle, wondrous countenance of the Madonna seemed now to weep and now to smile consolingly, above all to live, in a sublime reality not of earth, to live.

When the peasants arrived with the black swarm of Jews, Ramzin cried: “Room for the Jews!” And the kneeling, prostrate crowd made a lane for them to pass down. As the poor creatures, singly and in pairs, were shoved and prodded forward, it happened that this and that one of the peasant worshippers interrupted his devotions to spit at them. The nearer the Jews came towards the miracle, the more violently and often were their dark garments spat upon, and soon their caftans were stuck over and over with clots of silvery spittle, yellowish slime, a frightful and abstruse kind of crazy buttons. It was ludicrous and horrible.

They forced the Jews to kneel. And as they knelt, turning their lost and anxious eyes to right and left, as if to learn from which side still greater peril was about to fall upon them, and, filled with panic terror of the candles and the picture they illumined, tried to turn their heads away, Ramzin shouted suddenly from the back of the room: “Sing!”

And as the faithful, for close on the fiftieth time, intoned the Ave Maria once again, the Jews, in mortal fear, began to give forth ghastly sounds from their strangling throats, like the broken tune of a decrepit hurdy-gurdy, and bearing no resemblance to the anthem.

“Down on your faces!” Ramzin commanded. And the obedient Jews touched the floor with their foreheads. They held their caps clutched fast in their hands, as though they were the last symbols of their own faith which they were to be robbed of.

“Get up!” cried Ramzin. The Jews got up, feebly and absurdly hoping that they were now delivered from their torture.

“Come on, all!” said Ramzin’s fearful voice again. “We’ll take them home!”